A Qing historian reads the newspaper...

The idea of Manchu Sinicization is a hobgoblin unlikely to die anytime soon in China. Historians affiliated with what has become known as the “New Qing History” have been attempting to complicate this narrative for nearly three decades, and while scholars overseas — and even a few within China — are starting to come around, the dominant narrative inside China remains that the Manchus succeeded in ruling because, unlike earlier non-Han dynasties, they assimilated and adopted Chinese styles of rule and other cultural values. Indeed, according to the most strident adherents of “Sinicization”, the Manchus couldn’t help but assimilate once they encountered the vastly superior civilization of China.

Earlier this month, I came across an article in the China Daily on the study of Manchu language in China today and how this “archaic language is helping historians to solve Qing mysteries.” Sadly, after a few mentions of Manchu-language sources on the architectural and material culture of the Forbidden City and other imperial sites, the article descends into hoary and outdated old tropes:

According to Tong Yue, a Qing history expert from Shenyang, in northeastern Liaoning province, where the Manchu originated, the decline of the language started the moment this ethnic people sought to rule over the entire land of China, in the early 17th century.

“The Manchu people, similar to the Mongols 400 years before, came from the northeast to sweep the country by sheer military might, at a time when Han rulers – from the Chinese majority group – had become corrupt and weak,” he said. “Dutiful students of history, the Manchu had from the very beginning tried to avoid the fatal mistake committed by the Mongols.

“Instead of imposing on their subjects everything Manchu, the Qing rulers, awed by the much more sophisticated form of civilization they encountered in Central China, borrowed enthusiastically from this newfound cultural wealth, including the language.”

It’s a notion which obviously had great appeal to Chinese intellectuals in the early 20th century who were faced with writing a history of an era during which a ‘barbarian’ conquest dynasty not only ruled China for nearly three hundred years but also pushed the boundaries of the Chinese world further than any Han-ruled dynasty had ever achieved. In the rush to lay claim to China’s exceptional qualities as a nation (5000 years of history, 5000 years of continuous history, inventor of everything), it made sense to explain away Manchu success as a result of their thorough inculcation and internalization of Chinese values and civilization.

The Manchus also conquered vast areas in what is today Western China, including Tibet and Xinjiang. They were the first state on the mainland to consolidate their control over the island of Taiwan. This makes the issue of Manchu cultural identity politically problematic as well. Separating the Manchu-ruled Qing Empire from the post-imperial governments of the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China not only complicates modern Chinese attempts at establishing the extent of the Qing Empire as “inherent territory,” it also recalls bad memories of Japanese and British attempts to use the “Manchu-ness” of the Qing Empire to wrest control over Manchuria and Tibet respectively.

(It’s fair for me to state from the beginning, that I’m pretty firmly in the camp of New Qing History. My love of learning about Manchus has long been a running joke among my students and friends who accuse me, not unfairly, of having an unhealthy man-crush on The Kangxi Emperor.)

The litany of charges against the New Qing historians is a long one, but mostly they have come under fire for having the temerity to destabilize the idea of a historically-fixed China and reject the teleological narratives which so many Chinese historians love to cuddle up with at night to keep the bad feelings away.

It is clear that separating the notion of “Qing” from “China” is a good way to make Professor Li grumpy: Of course China=Qing, it always has! This is obvious! Anyone who says otherwise is an evil imperialist! Why am I shouting! I don’t know!

If the Chinese language had a version of writing in CAPS LOCK, I think this article is it.

On the issue of whether the Qing was an empire, and in particular an expansive empire, James Millward—who, full disclosure alert, is one of my favorite historians—comes in for a bit of a drubbing:

“New Qing History” obscures the truth about “Empire.” The essential characteristics of Imperialism are aggression, expansion, and plundering of occupied territories. For example, from the beginning of the 16th century, first Spain and then especially England, extended their power from Europe to North and South America and eventually to Asia and Africa. Wherever their ships landed there was blood and fire! Then an occupation of the land and the enslavement of local people. France, Germany, Russia similarly expanded and invaded foreign lands. In the 19th century, there was the rise of Japanese militarism and an especially frenzied form of aggression. After the conclusion of the Civil War in the United States, the tentacles of American Imperialism reached toward Asia. Ask: Which of the five continents has not been invaded and enslaved by these powers? Which of these countries did not invade China? 200 years ago, what was the United States? It was White people from Europe plundering, killing,and annihilating the Native Americans to take their land and build the United States. THAT is real Imperialism!

During the century between the Opium War and 1945, when Japan surrendered [Ed Note: To whom, I wonder?] European powers and Japanese bandits came to China and brutally massacred Chinese people of all nationalities. They plundered China’s resources, with Russia and Japan seizing huge swaths of territory. The powers carved up the land of China into spheres of influence. Is this not the basic characteristics of Imperialism? The Western powers and Japan imposed humiliation on the Chinese nation and the Qing government was unable to resist and had to sue for peace. How can this become Imperialism? The Qing Dynasty was corrupt, backwards and never on a par with Western or Japanese imperialists, how can we use the same language to describe it?

Even though obviously, Modern China clearly suffered at the hands of the Western Powers, James Millward says: “Modern China is a part of the story of Imperialism.” How arrogant! How wildly presumptuous! We can see how the absurdity of these American scholars is a kind of pathology!

Mark Elliott–okay, another Granite Studio fave–also receives a fair amount of criticism, especially for promoting the idea that Manchus are different from Han, Manchuria is different from China, and for arguing that the Manchu conquest of Ming China constituted an invasion. This is of course a pretty simplistic reading of Professor Elliott’s work, although by the end of Professor Li’s article one wonders if he actually did his own close analysis of Crossley, Millward, and Elliott or if he simply cribbed the notes from one of their less attentive undergrad students.

They are claiming that Manchus were “foreign” and so not a part of the Chinese nation and are not inherently a nationality of China. therefore, Manchu and Han, and Manchu and China are not related. As Mark Elliott said: “The Manchu people conquered ‘中原 Zhongyuan’ (Ed Note: The word is a little ambiguous because while it can mean China, it also specifically means the central provinces of China) to establish the Qing Empire…and used overwhelming military force to conquer the Ming Dynasty…and was a foreign invasion against China’s sovereignty.”

The New Qing History clearly declares: Manchus are “alien.” They entered through the pass and seized power. They destroyed China’s sovereignty, and further slander Manchus as foreign invaders. These arguments abound in the writings of scholars from Europe and America…These scholars equate the Qing Dynasty as if it were Japanese militarism!

Yeah…that was totally Elliott’s point in “The Manchu Way: How the Qing Emperors were really Hideki Tojo in Pigtails.” No wonder I got that question wrong on my comps.

Did the Qing Dynasty unify the frontiers (Ed Note: Refers to Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, etc.) or invade them? The New Qing scholars insist on the latter point of view: The Qing consolidated their control over these regions through military force….The fact is however that the Qing Dynasty inherited the unity of past dynasties including the unity of these regions. How can this be an invasion? Mongolia,Τibeτ, Χinjiang are China’s inherent territory, how can the Qing reunification of these areas be a military conquest? There is no need to refute the arguments [of these scholars]. How are they different than the splittists who cry out for “Τibeτan Ιndependence” or “Μongolian Ιndependence” (Ed Note: Uh…Mongolia is independent, or at least most of it…) and “Easτ Τurkesτan Separaτisτs” or that these places are “not part of China” and bang the drum of “independence”?

It’s clear that by introducing ideas and evidence at odds with accepted and cherished narratives, the New Qing History and its associated scholars have hit a nerve in the academic community.

I also agree with China Media Project’s David Bandurski who argues: “Most readers of the piece could not fail to note the clear political bias at work — not to mention the unwarranted (in academic discourse) aggression. The essay, in fact, is not about historical scholarship at all, but about China’s current ideological climate.”

The concluding paragraph — and here I’m being lazy and using CMP’s translation —descends into a veritable orgy of righteous indignation and exclamation points:

“New Qing History” is academically absurd, and politically does damage to the unity of China. It is necessary to stir all scholars with a sense of righteousness to fiercely oppose it. We entirely reject “New Qing History.” Moreover, we expose its mask of pseudo-academic scholarship, eliminating the deleterious effect it has had on scholarship in China!

First of all, “China” (Zhongguo) only officially became the name of our country with the founding of the Republic of China in 1912. Before this, the idea of China (“Zhongguo”) was not clearly conceptualized. The concept of “China” has continued to expand. From referring specifically to the central plains of China, the concept has since grown to now refer generally to a whole nation. Even during the late Qing, “China” would sometimes be used as a name to refer to the Qing State, including all the territory with in the boundaries of the Qing Empire, but other times it would only refer to the “18 Interior Provinces” and not include Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Therefore, if we want to understand the extent of ancient China’s territory, we can only speak of how large was the actual territory controlled by a particular dynasty at a particular moment. For example: How big was the Qin Dynasty? How big was the Tang Dynasty? How big was the Qing Dynasty? If you want to say how large was “China” at a certain time, you need to explain how “China” is conceptualized, including explaining which Dynasty or regime is being discussed…

Until now, there are those people who feel that the more they exaggerate the territory of historical “China” or China’s successive dynasties and kingdoms the more patriotic they are. Actually, it is exactly the opposite. If China really wishes to rise peacefully, we must understand the true facts of history, only then will we be able to know the sum of our history, learn from our experiences, and so be on a solid footing to face the future.

So clearly not all members of the historical community have completely lost their minds. I also think that many (most?) of the younger generation of Qing historians — quite a few of whom did their graduate training outside of the PRC — would roll their eyes at Professor Li’s vitriol. But it’s clear that the ideological retrenchment which seems to be the new normal is reaching into even arcane corners of the Sinological universe.

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Update April 24: An earlier version of this post had this paragraph:

A colleague of mine, a PhD student at Beijing Normal University, recounted on twitter yesterday how Mark Elliott was once “nearly got chased out of a class at Beijing Normal for using 侵略 (“invade”) to describe Qing in Xinjiang.”

According to Professor Elliott, he’s never actually given a talk at Beijing Normal, so this sounds like an apocryphal story.

Speaking purely hypothetically, however, I would guess that using the words “Qing” “Invade” and “Xinjiang” in a lecture at a local university would be, academically speaking, a little like slathering oneself in bacon grease before addressing a room full of rabid poodles.

That said, there’s a lot I wish I knew 13 years ago. This week I was asked to write some suggestions for a group of students visiting Beijing. It gave me the opportunity to jot down a few reflections on things learned, in most cases later than I should have but still…13 years is a long time and I hope I’ve accumulated at least some wisdom to go along with the steadily building accumulation of PM 2.5 material in my lungs.

There are a lot of people in China. No, seriously.

It’s the single defining fact of life for anybody who lives here, whether you were born in China or moved here from somewhere else. If you are an American, consider for a moment an alternate universe where the population of the USA was quintupled and then everybody was moved east of the Mississippi. A fierce competition for everything – a spot in school, a job, somebody to marry, a house, a seat on the subway, or that last dumpling – is a part of daily life in China.

What Americans feel is a “normal” amount of personal space and privacy is considered a luxury beyond the reckoning of most people who live here. Sometimes people can seem a little in a hurry or a little pushy. Perhaps you’ll see somebody cutting in line. At times like this it’s important to keep perspective: You’ve just joined the world’s longest running and most competitive game of musical chairs.

Basically, for 5000 years, there were two guys: The one who waited patiently in line and the guy who got what he needed to feed his family. Even though China is developing rapidly, old habits die hard.

People will have made assumptions about you as a foreigner (especially an American) before you even can say “Ni Hao.”

In fact, if you do say “Ni hao” then you’ve already challenged one basic assumption held by many people in China: That the Chinese language is too difficult for foreigners to master or understand.

Nobody likes to be a stereotype, but it happens. Want to know what many Chinese think about us? They think Americans are pushy, entitled, aggressive, arrogant and tend to throw tantrums when things are just the way they want it (or like it is “back home”).

To put it another way: It’s as if when we go through passport control at the Beijing airport, the immigration officer changes all of our last names to “Kardashian.”

Now it’s not true that all Americans act like Kim and Khloe when they go abroad, and it’s not fair that many people in China paint all foreigners/Americans with the same brush, but hey…there have been just enough pushy, entitled, aggressive, arrogant foreigners who have traveled to China over the years to keep the myth alive.

We can whine about the unfairness of it all, or we can see this as an opportunity to fight the stereotype and rise above the cliché. China is one of the friendliest places in the world and, as my mother once said, a little bit of sugar goes a long way. Remember that the minute we do get angry, or pout, or start complaining about how things here aren’t like they are “back home” all we are doing is feeding the beast.

So I’ve learned that it’s always best to be a little too humble, a little too nice, a little too polite…and to smile a lot. When I do this, I can see minds change and old attitudes fall away as people start to question the stereotype…more importantly, the nicer I am, the easier my life becomes.

The thing is that in China, people generally won’t go out of the way to help you (even people we think “should” like waitresses, taxi drivers, or hotel staff) unless they like you. It can take a few smiles and some humility to get them to forget their prejudices and figure out how nice you are. Once that happens, however, you’ll find out that your new friend will go out of their way to help you.

People talk a lot about the power of guanxi (relationships) in China, especially in the context of business. But guanxi is not only signing a multi-million deal with an old school buddy, it’s a way of life. Every encounter you have in China – from a new professional contact to the waitress who brings you your morning dumplings – is a moment to build a connection and make a relationship. With each connection you make, your life in China gets a little bit better and a whole lot easier.

Be careful not to mistake having 40 conversations with having the same conversation 40 times.

I hear it all the time: “I learn more hanging out at clubs than I do in Chinese class.” No, you really don’t. You become very good at introducing yourself, saying where you are from, and making the same stupid joke (“Do you like 涮洋肉?” which you use every time somebody points out you sweat a lot when you dance.) If you find yourself having the same conversation over and over again, it’s time to branch out. Don’t be afraid to open your mouth, bring the Zhongwen, and then epically fail. If you’re not failing — and I mean catastrophic failure of mindbending embarrassment — on a regular basis, you’re not trying hard enough. I’ve lived here a long time and I have at least one complete breakdown in my Hanyu communication a day. But I try not to make the same mistake twice.

Be patient. It’s on the list.

Everyone is talking about how China is a rising economic and global power. (In fact, in a recent poll, 44% of Americans thought – incorrectly — that China is the world’s largest economic power.) On the other hand, when you divide China’s economy by 1.4 billion, you get a very different number: 77. Which is where China sits in the global rankings of countries by nominal per capita GDP, right between Bulgaria and Botswana.

This is not to take anything away from China and it’s incredible trajectory over the past four decades. After all, it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that China in 1978 (the eve of the Reform and Opening Era) made today’s North Korea seem like Dubai. In much less than a single lifetime, China’s development has completely transformed its economy and lifted millions out of poverty.

Nevertheless, today in Beijing and Shanghai where we zip past the Bentley dealership to grab a Starbucks before we head out to a high-end duck restaurant or maybe a rooftop tapas bar, it can be hard to remember that China still has a long way to go. More importantly: People in China are well aware that the country still has a long way to go to catch up with the developed economies of the world. That’s why it’s important for those of us from other countries – and particular those of us who were lucky enough to grow up in a developed economy – to be aware of how criticism or complaints about China might sound to people who live here.

China still has many problems…but these are problems which, for the most part, are already on the “To Do List.” Too often, foreigners (and I’ve done this too, guilty as charged) focus on what China hasn’t done, what it hasn’t figured out, what it still needs to fix rather than on the incredible strides made in what, in world historical terms, is an infinitesimally short amount of time.

It’s easy to understand why many people in China get frustrated when it seems like all the world focuses on is China’s problems, as if people in China weren’t already keenly aware of those problems already. As the author Peter Hessler recently put it: “Why do foreign correspondents [in China] only write about the bridge that collapses and not the thousands of bridges that don’t?”

This isn’t to say that China doesn’t have serious problems. It does. Bridges do collapse. So do schools sometimes. These are real tragedies that deserve our attention. But here is a list of things that do not qualify as a tragedy:

The waitress can’t speak English.

The public bathrooms smell funny.

People stare at me.

The farmer’s kid who just moved to Beijing doesn’t know who to make a proper margarita.

The streets are dirty.

People spit. In public.

That guy cut in line.

It’s only natural – a well-documented sign of culture shock actually – that we compare our new environment, usually unfavorably, with what we left behind. But remember that despite all of the problems in China, people here are as proud of their home as we would be.

It’s okay to think critically, but before we complain or criticize let’s consider how our criticisms might be understood by our new Chinese friends.

Of all the keys to surviving in China the most important is a sense of humor. China can be a funny place. Whether it’s for 3 weeks or 13 years, every day in China you will walk out your door and see something that day you have never seen before. Usually something that makes you say: “In any other country, that would seem strange…”

Also, China finds us funny. Or at least if finds me funny. I have come to accept that I’m a source of constant mirth and amusement for my Chinese friends, family and neighbors…and that’s BEFORE I open my mouth to speak my version of Chinese.Here’s the thing: If you can’t laugh at yourself and the mistakes you make and the weird situations you find yourself in during your China experience then this can be a rough place.

Who doesn’t succeed in China? It’s the dude who takes himself WAY too seriously. The person who thinks people are constantly disrespecting them. The guy who can’t find the funny when things don’t go their way. It’s the person born with an indignation circuit which fires at every slight – perceived or real, because the truth is…China can give you a lot to be indignant about.

I’ve met people who have an indignation circuit that fired at everything. Every injustice. Every outrage. Every trivial indignity. And the result is that they – and their circuit – burned out completely and they bailed, or they stayed and tried to drink the pain away in a Sanlitun speakeasy.

Here’s an important lesson that I wish I learned sooner: If I walk out my door in the morning and I run into somebody who JUST. DOESN’T. GET. IT. Well that’s sad but then again there are dicks in every country. If at the end of the day all I’ve encountered are people who JUST. DON’T. GET. IT. Well…then it’s time to realize that I might be the dick who doesn’t get it and I am need of an attitude adjustment.

Or to summarize even more briefly…the basic rule of getting along in any foreign culture: Don’t be a dick.

China is a pretty safe place.

It’s one of the few positive things about living in an authoritarian one-party state run by guys so paranoid they make your neighborhood meth head look like a picture of Zen calm.

That said, it’s important to use common sense.

At night, go out and come home as a group. If you’re getting ready to leave and there’s one person in your group who wants to stay and hang out by himself or herself with their new best friends “Elder Brother Wang” and “Uncle Li,” put them in a hammer lock and get them in a cab.Similarly, no matter how annoying your friend is at the bar and how she won’t shut up about her boyfriend or her ex-boyfriend, do not just flag a cab, hand the driver the hotel card, deposit her in the back seat, and wish them both a good night. Stick together and watch out for each other.

Why I’m Here…

China can be a challenging place to live and visit. But it’s also one of the warmest, friendliest places I’ve ever been. You can go from “just met” to “best friends for life” in a single conversation, and once you’ve made a friend, Heaven and Earth will be moved to help you when you need it. Once we start accepting China for what it is rather than what it’s not or what we wish it would be, that’s when we realize what an amazing opportunity we have to engage with one of the world’s most dynamic and exciting countries. I was trained as a historian, and in history there are certain moments which intersect with certain places to create eras. Think: Victorian London, 1920s Paris, 1950s New York. Well, that moment and that place is right now and in China and I want to be a witness. Think about it: Where else could a lover of history watch the kind of historical change that took decades in the rest of the world happen in just a few years and right before his very eyes?

China may not be the easiest place to live, and the Internet still sucks, but there’s nowhere I’d rather be.

This year, I bought a MacBook Air. I love it, which is good because I’m pretty sure I paid more for my new computer than I did for my first car. The problem is that buying a fancy new computin’ device and then hooking it up to the Chinese Internet is like buying a Ferrari if you live in a town with only cobblestone streets.

Over the last few months, as has been widely reported, the Chinese government has tightened its control over the Internet. This process has included completely cutting off access to Google services, disrupting popular VPN providers, and generally being dickish about the whole idea of a global Internet.

I cannot count the number of times I’ve been in a place like Bali or a remote Thai island and marveled — positively did dances of joy and celebration — at the speed and reliability of the Internet there.

Think about that. If I were an Internet entrepreneur or investor in China, I’m not sure I’d want to hear about how Thailand and Indonesia — not exactly known as tech hotspots — offered superior connectivity to the global web.

For anybody — both local and laowai — who still thinks this is a great business environment, or that China has a bright future as a research hub or intellectual incubator, I would strongly suggest spending 30 minutes trying to do a few routine business tasks that involve accessing Internet sites not based in China.

I choose to live here, and there are many positive reasons why that is. China is an amazing place. It’s an incredibly safe country, and is, after a fashion, not a bad place to live and work. But it’s frustrating when what should be a five-minute task takes me twenty minutes and reconfiguring my VPN three times just to check it off my to-do list.

As the government moves from cracking down on social media to cutting off access to staples of global business communication and productivity, will people in China finally start to notice?

The old trope is that the government could always shut down Facebook or YouTube or Twitter or Google’s search engine because there were popular local alternatives. The fact that foreign websites loaded slowly didn’t matter to most Chinese Internet users. Why? Because they didn’t need to rely on overseas sites for those things which Internet users care about most: Entertainment, music, social media, shopping, and gaming.

Business though…that’s a bit different, and people everywhere tend to get cranky when you start messing with their livelihood. Or their kid’s chance at getting into a university overseas.

A few years ago, I compared the CCP to a jealous stalker boyfriend. His girlfriend really loves him, because he has a lot of good qualities, but despite this he can’t (or won’t) believe that she’s really into him. In his twisted and delusional mind, he cooks up paranoid fantasies of his lovely and innocent girl spending her free time in joyful coitus with some or all of the Seattle Seahawks.

So jealous stalker boyfriend begins eavesdropping when she’s on the phone, asking questions about who she’s talking to and where she’s been, telling her she can’t hang out with certain friends, and insisting she call him every ten minutes so he can “be sure she’s okay.”

But after a while that’s not enough, because that’s how crazy works. Soon he’s hacking her emails, and checking her phone when she’s in the shower, and following her when she’s with her friends and…

You get the idea. No matter how much this girl loved him to begin with, she’s going to get creeped out.

The Chinese government, especially of late, has done a better than average job of convincing people in China that their interests are in pretty close alignment with those of the Party. But as control of information and technology becomes more obvious and intrusive, I wonder if Internet users in China will find this new-found interest in their online habits “lovingly protective” or “stalker creepy.” Because truth be told, there are not a lot of people willing to commit to a long-term relationship with creepy.

One of the best books on empire, colonialism, and de-colonization I have read in the past few years is Pankaj Mishra’s brilliant From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia. It’s a sprawling story told through the biographical sketches of major Asian intellectuals such as Liang Qichao, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, and Abdurreshi al Ibrahim, near contemporaries who witnessed the crumbling of empire and worried about what might come next in a world still dominated by North Atlantic states and Western value systems.

Mishra has a new book coming out, A Great Clamour, a collection of essays specifically about China (and Greater China.) I haven’t read it yet (I will soon) but in a Q&A with Ed Wong of the New York Times this morning, Mishra touched on a number of topics related to China, including the Hong Kong protests, the administration of Xi Jinping, and the difficulties that the CCP has had dealing with issues of nationality and ethnicity in border and minority regions of China.

NYT: You’ve written about the peripheries of China and their importance to Beijing. We’ve seen strong rebellions in Tibet and Xinjiang, and now in Hong Kong. What is your take today on how China is managing the aspirations of people in its far-flung regions? Are the problems China is facing the same ones that empires had before? Do you see potential political solutions to these problems that would be consistent with the ethos and behavior of the Communist Party?

Mishra: I don’t think it has been sufficiently recognized that the C.C.P. has been incredibly adaptive since the days of Mao. The fact that it has not only survived great disasters but also grown and strengthened itself by including people from all sections of Chinese society shows that it has the capacity to absorb and defuse many apparent contradictions. But it has yet to demonstrate that it can deal with challenges from outside its circle of influence — the ethnic minorities and, now, Hong Kong. The usual method of incorporating local elites through bribery and coercion into the network of capitalism and modernization doesn’t work. The Tibetans, for instance, still feel trampled upon, their dignity defiled, their identity dishonored. I am still waiting to see a new initiative from Xi Jinping in this regard. And this is a bigger problem for Beijing than the ones faced by empires like the Qing or Ottoman. The latter were not asking their minorities to radically overhaul their societies and lifestyles or forcing changes in their identity. Even British and French imperialists left many minorities alone for the most part.

I complete agree. I wrote something very similar in a 2008 post on Tibet entitled “From Imperial Subjects to National Citizens.” Former students will recognize parts of this because it is a key component in my lectures on Qing Empire and the relationship between the Manchu rulers and their subjects:

The Manchus did maintain garrisons on the Τibetan plateau while administering the region through local elites. The Qing rulers, great patrons of Lamamism, consolidated their rule by maintaining cultural and religious ties with Τibet beyond mere military occupation. They also–generally but not always–ruled with a light touch, allowing relative autonomy in religious and cultural matters, which suited the situation quite well. The Qing Dynasty was, after all, a large, multi-ethnic empire, and maintaining order and peace in outlying territories was the utmost concern.

The problem is that the PRC is a nation-state, and the demands a nation-state places on its people are different than those of an empire. It is not enough that Tibetans merely pay taxes and not revolt, they must also identify with the nation-state first and foremost, with other cultural and religious aspects secondary to the demands of modern state building. Empires want to be respected, nation-states want to be loved. That’s a sticky wicket the Qing never had to face.

It’s not surprising that when we look at the world’s hot spots we see the legacies of colonialism and decolonization. As empires give way to new forms of political organization there is resistance and tension. Modern states attempt to preserve the territories bequeathed to them from empires of old, while subject peoples seek greater autonomy and even independence.

While it is always possible that both Mishra and I are wrong, and the CCP and its parrots supporters would certainly feel that way, it is validating to know that one of my favorite writers and thinkers on the subject of empire has views consistent with what I’ve been lecturing about for years.

Fine as far as it goes when published in English, but getting the book ready for a Chinese pressing proved a little more difficult than anticipated. First, his wife’s family requested some small changes in the Chinese version to help put the family in a better light.

Then there were questions of history itself. Did Sun Yat-sen oppose class conflict? Can you quantify the number of people who died as a result of the Great Leap Forward as “millions” in a particular province or would it be better to simply say “quite a few?” To what extent did Deng Xiaoping’s legacy repudiate that of Chairman Mao?

The book’s treatment of the Qing Dynasty also caused problems. This is a subject on which Professor Esherick has written many times and is a noted authority. The post recaps the hilarity which ensued when he tried to publish in China an earlier essay on the transition from Qing Empire-Chinese nation-state. In the case of Ancestral Leaves:

Members of the Ye family had been officials in China’s last dynasty, the Qing, and one had served as governor of the northwestern province of Shaanxi as it recovered from a massive and destructive rebellion by the local Muslim population, much of which had been wiped out in the process. The press admitted that the narrative could not ignore this rebellion, but all mention of its ethnic dimension had to be cut.

The same principle guided discussion of the Qing dynasty itself. The Qing was ruled by Manchus from the north, and their armies had conquered the previous dynasty and greatly expanded the empire to include Mongolia, Tibet, and the Turkic Muslim regions that are now Xinjiang. But the Manchus are now one of the 56 official “nationalities” that make up the Chinese people, so the Manchu conquest had to be rephrased as nothing more than one (implicitly Chinese) ethnic group coming from beyond the Great Wall to rule the rest of China.

Fortunately on this and many other points, Professor Esherick stuck to his guns and although the book was published with edits, these edits did not significantly alter the narrative of the original nor did they ignore or re-write historical evidence.

The Chinese translation of Autumn Leaves is now selling very well inside the PRC.

One wishes that more international authors showed the same backbone when working with Chinese publishers.

Jeremiah JenneJoseph Boyle has it right and many of the other answers have alluded to this: The problem is one of translation. One of the challenges with this kind of question is that we have one word in English ("Chinese") to cover a variety of words in the Chinese language which differ from each other […]

Jeremiah JenneThis kind of question always elicits a strong response and understandably so. On one hand, to claim that subway etiquette, especially boarding and disembarking, is the same in Beijing as it is in, say, San Francisco or London is to be either naive or disingenuous. I've lived in Beijing for 13 years, and at […]